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Neil Young plays Air Canada Centre Nov. 19

By Joel RubinoffTorstar News Service

Sun., Nov. 18, 2012

For those expecting Neil Young’s concert at the Air Canada Centre on Monday to be a nostalgic stroll down memory lane, a cautionary word: yes, there will be a few hard-rocking classics, but don’t expect to hear anything that came close to hitting the top 40 during his 1970s chart heyday.

A scan of set lists for other shows on this tour shows no pop radio hits, at least five new songs off his just released double disc, Psychedelic Pill — with a couple clocking in near the 20-minute mark — and a song lineup unflinchingly consistent from show to show, except the encore.

Forget about Young’s chart-topping unions with hippie harmonizers Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and his pioneering work with ’60s folk-rock trio Buffalo Springfield.

This is a Crazy Horse tour.

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And as anyone who has followed Young’s career can attest, this motley collection of virtuoso headbangers is the archetypical garage band, a protopunk outfit that delights in mixing ear-bleeding distortion with the kind of ragged experimentation that hasn’t been commonplace since the Age of Aquarius.

Disappointed? Then you’re not a true fan. Because as the diehards know, the one consistent thing about the 67-year-old Toronto native has always been his inconsistency.

“The king of the left turn,” former Buffalo Springfield bandmate Steven Stills called him. And it’s been Young’s mantra since he followed the massive success of Harvest — the bestselling album of ’72 and his only record to hit No. 1 — with a series of murky follow-ups (On The Beach, Tonight’s The Night) that seemed, at the time, like intentional attempts to derail his career.

Guess what? It didn’t work. Every time critics wrote him off, every time commercial radio turned its back, he changed directions and bounced back, more vital and relevant than before.

From occasionally confounding experiments with rockabilly, big band blues and synthesized computer rock to the delicate folk-pop and monster guitar riffs that have repeatedly proved his salvation, the man affectionately dubbed “Shakey” has seldom catered to the middle-of-the-road marketplace, heading instead, as he put it in the liner notes for Decade, “for the ditch — a rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people there.”

Ah yes, the ditch. Having resided there for the better part of, well, his entire career, he became something of a poster boy for the burgeoning indie rock movement of the ’90s and found himself proclaimed the “Godfather of Grunge” by a generation of Seattle-based upstarts who looked to him for inspiration.

“It’s better to burn out than to fade away,” he crooned on his iconic 1979 song “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue).”

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Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, no less, took this lyric to heart when he blew his brains out with a shotgun at the height of his career in 1994, quoting Young’s lyric in his suicide note.

The irony, of course, is that Young — a cagey survivalist with the soul of a poet — had no intention of following his own advice, something noted by an astute John Lennon shortly before his own death: “I mean, it’s garbage you know. If Neil Young admires that sentiment so much, why doesn’t he do it? Because he sure as hell faded away and came back many times, like all of us.”

It’s true. Like a midway whack-a-mole, or a less calculating Madonna, he just keeps reinventing himself. It’s earned him more than his share of critical drubbings.

And yet, here he is, still packing concert halls on his own terms while his ’60s contemporaries market themselves as nostalgia-peddling jukeboxes.

When, for example, was the last Rolling Stones song that really meant anything? What about The Beach Boys? Aerosmith? Van Halen?

Young, by contrast, is like Bob Dylan: a quirky enigma, as cantankerously unruly today as the day he left the creative sanctity of Buffalo Springfield to embark on a Byzantine, logic-confounding solo career that has ensured he’s never grown stale.

“Every one of my records, to me, is like an ongoing autobiography,” he famously told Rolling Stone magazine in 1975, around the time of his first commercial trough.

“I can’t write the same book every time. There are artists that can. They put out three or four albums every year and everything (bleep)in’ sounds the same. That isn’t my trip. My trip is to express what’s on my mind.

“I don’t give a (bleep) if my audience is a hundred or a hundred million. It doesn’t make any difference to me. I’m convinced that what sells and what I do are two completely different things. If they meet, it’s coincidence.”

In this respect, he’s like Woody Allen, a prodigiously prolific filmmaker who also followed his creative muse through peaks and valleys, and enjoys a loyal cult that occasionally intrudes on the mainstream.

It’s not a logical route to success — in fact, it’s probably anathema — but for a visionary musician who astutely recognized his commercial niche as a creative prison, it not only proved the key to longevity, it turned him into the one thing a wall full of gold records never could: an artist.

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